


Down a Dark Well

by scioscribe



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Shameless Plot Contrivance, Undead Owen Harper
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:53:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25103494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: “What do you remember?”“We were eating dinner …”“Right. Only nobody’d ordered the pizza; you lot just decided to chow down on whatever showed up at the door. Life is wasted on the bloody living.”
Relationships: Owen Harper & Ianto Jones, Owen Harper & Torchwood Team, Owen Harper & Toshiko Sato
Comments: 4
Kudos: 69
Collections: Eat Drink and Make Merry 2020





	Down a Dark Well

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sholio](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/gifts).



Owen was shredding a paper napkin, and everyone else was eating.

You’d think that if his sense of taste had more or less gone, the least his sense of smell could do was bugger off with it, but no, that would make things too easy, wouldn’t it? So he was stuck sitting there, getting a noseful of pepperoni feast pizza so piping hot and fragrant it was like it’d just come out of the oven. The smell was bloody maddening.

“Oi, try to leave enough napkins so we can dab a bit of the grease off our fingers,” Gwen said, stretching out to bump the toe of her boot against Owen’s shin. She was smiling but a bit uncertain about it, like he wasn’t fair game anymore.

“Seems fair,” he said evenly. “You lot get all the pizza, and I get all the indigestibles.”

“Mm.” Jack licked his fingers with an all-too-conscious showiness. “Hang in there, and you’ll all be able to digest paper by, oh, the fortieth century or so.”

“It’s good to have things to look forward to,” Tosh said, ducking her head like she didn’t want to be caught making a joke.

Ianto leaned across the table and hooked one of Owen’s stock of takeaway napkins—pitiless bastard—and dabbed at his pizza. There was a small indentation between his eyebrows, one that made him look a bit un-Ianto-like. “Not usually this greasy, is it?”

“You stole my napkin.”

“They’re communal.”

“Communal my arse.”

“Ooh, tell me more,” Jack said. “I like where this is going.”

“No,” Tosh said, looking down at her slice. “No, you’re right, Ianto. It’s definitely worse than usual.”

Gwen shrugged. “I almost don’t mind it. Reminds me a bit of university—God knows I shoveled enough cheap pizza into myself back then, studying late at night. But you’re the one with the all the takeaway numbers. I don’t think there’ll be an uprising if you start ordering from somewhere else.”

“But I didn’t order this,” Ianto said.

Owen was looking down at his heap of torn-up napkins. None of them had a restaurant logo on them. And the last time he’d done this, he seemed to remember that there’d been bits of red in there: some smiling Mario-looking twat inked onto the paper above the pizzeria’s name.

Gwen said, “Well, if you didn’t order it, who did?”

Tosh shook her head.

“Don’t look at me,” Jack said. “Owen?”

“What, was I just supposed to _deduce_ that you lot might be getting hungry?”

“So not Owen either.” Jack slid the pizza box over to him. “Pepperoni, Ianto’s usual order. Right logo on the box. Maybe it was a mistake.”

Owen held up one of the intact napkins. “I wouldn’t jump to that just yet. The napkins are wrong.”

“Shit,” Ianto said, looking down at the crumpled one in his hand. “You’re right.”

“Well, the important thing is we all realized this before we ate any,” Jack said, with a tight smile that didn’t come close to touching his eyes. “Also, food shows up here and we just start eating it, no questions asked? Anyone ever think it behooved a secret organization to be a little wary about things like that?”

“You ate it too,” Owen pointed out.

“And if something happens to me, it doesn’t matter. I’ll bounce back. The rest of you, on the other hand—”

“We don’t even know for sure anything’s wrong yet,” Gwen said. There was strained hope in her voice. “Do we? Not for sure.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Owen stood up. “I’m prescribing you all a swing of ipecac, anyway. Doctor’s orders.”

“I’m not going to have to call Rhys and say goodbye to him just because I ate some bloody _pizza_.”

“No one’s saying goodbye to anybody,” Jack said. His eyes met Owen’s, and he gave him a crisp, military nod: dismissed.

Right. Ipecac, then. Cheery.

He was halfway to surgery to get the bottle when he heard a muffled crash upstairs. Someone had fallen.

He broke into a run, but before he’d made it back to the stairs, he spun around again and sprinted to surgery, fumbling through his cabinets looking for the bottle. Ipecac, ipecac, where had he been keeping the bloody ipecac? Why did he always let this shit get jumbled up? There. He pocketed it and raced back; no adrenaline in him now to blot out his consciousness of the ticking clock. If he’d lost them—

Tosh was down on the floor, pulled half-up so her head pillowed on Jack’s lap. Owen dropped to his knees too early, skidding to her, and he felt the dim sensation of the friction tearing at his skin. He was unscrewing the lid, and he heard himself say, “What happened? Anything else you can tell me, besides her falling?”

“She said her ears were ringing,” Ianto said. Owen glanced up at him and saw that his hands were curled around the edge of the table; he was gripping it so hard his knuckles had gone white, and he looked like a bloody Victorian getting ready for a swoon. “And she was dizzy.”

“Yeah, and so are you.” He got the lid off the bottle. “So sit down. –Okay, Tosh, drink for me, that’s it.”

Jack propped her up a little without Owen having to ask, and Owen tilted the bottle at her lips.

“Here you go, sweetheart.” She sputtered at first, but he stroked her throat and got her to swallow. He glanced up and saw that Jack’s face had gone gray-green like old cheese. “Oh, for God’s sake. You’re all dropping like flies. Gwen, are you still up? Dammit, Tosh, that’s supposed to have worked by now. _Gwen_.”

“I’m here.” She sounded wobbly, though, and if Ianto wasn’t jumping in to give a report, Owen had to assume he was worse for wear too. Fuck.

He said to Jack, “I’ve got to leave you. I’m sorry, but—”

Jack waved him off. “Go. I’ll be fine.” He stood, and, off-color as he was, still hoisted Tosh up in his arms as if she was nothing but a trifle. Bloody showoff, Owen thought; something twisted in his chest, worry winding itself up like a rope. He wanted to say that it wasn’t fucking fine, but it had to be, didn’t he? He’d said it himself: he had to push Jack aside for now to concentrate on the people who _wouldn’t_ just pop back up again if they died.

And his emetic still wasn’t working on Tosh. He tried it on Ianto next, Ianto still conscious enough to gamely try to gulp it down for him. Owen put a hand round the back of his head, his fingers in Ianto’s now sweat-soaked hair, and he squeezed the nape of his neck for a second before moving on to Gwen. She was grayish but, like Ianto, still somewhat upright.

“What for?” she said, when he moved toward her with the ipecac. “It’s not working, is it?”

“Still worth trying, especially since it’s not like I’ve thought of anything else yet.”

She downed her bit of ipecac like it was a shot of whiskey and then gave him a weak smile. “If I didn’t know you, I’d say you poisoned us. Because you got proper fed up with us and our pepperoni feasts.”

“I wasn’t going to do it for another week yet. Clearly some bastard beat me to it.”

Tosh stirred, pushing herself upright on the sofa where Jack had laid her. She looked dazed, her pupils so dilated Owen could tell it from across the room.

God, it was like working the whole of Casualty by himself. He rushed over to her, not liking the way she just blinked at him, all that jewel-bright sharpness disconnected from her gaze: Toshiko Sato not at home.

“Tosh?”

“I’m so cold.”

She had to be; she was shaking like a leaf. Probably a fever, but if it would make her feel better even for the moment—he stripped his jacket off and wrapped it around her.

“That any better?”

She bit down on her lip and nodded, but he had the feeling the real answer was no. Tosh was a nightmare when she needed doctoring: she’d try to make you feel better, not tell you where she was hurting. Owen squeezed her hands—no body warmth to pass on there—and had to leave her.

He had to get them all on one side of the room. That would at least be something.

That _bloody_ pizza. Why hadn’t he noticed the bit with the napkins sooner?

Nothing to do about it right now. He took stock of them.

Trembling Tosh, conscious now but disoriented and most likely feverish. Ianto was out, his head down against the table, and Jack hadn’t gotten to him to cushion it, so Jack was feeling like shit as well; theory borne out by how he was now the color of an old washrag. Gwen had her jaw clenched, and Owen could hear her teeth grinding. Unearthly sound.

“Let yourself faint if you need to, for God’s sake,” he said to her. “Tosh woke up. I think it’s safe.”

“Ianto,” Jack said.

“Your boyfriend’s next on my list, don’t worry.” Owen tipped Ianto back in his chair and rolled him over to Tosh. “Look at the posture you’ve got. Don’t even move when I’m sliding you across the room—could balance a silver plater on your head, tea boy.” He gently lifted one of Ianto’s eyelids with his thumb. His pupils were dilated just like Tosh’s, but they at least reacted a bit when he turned Ianto’s head towards the light. Owen patted him on the cheek. “All right, Sleeping Beauty. I’ll come back to you.”

He moved on to Gwen, maneuvering her over next to Tosh and Ianto.

“Loosen your jaw up a bit. It’s giving me a toothache just to look at you.”

“I don’t like this, Owen.”

“I’m not too happy about it either. And—ah, there she goes.” Passed out like the rest, which let him turn to Jack, just for a second or two, with Tosh’s state flashing neon in his mind. He wheeled him over. There: pretty maids all in a row. Two pretty maids and two pretty blokes, anyway. He pressed two fingers to Jack’s throat and felt his pulse going at a gallop. Couldn’t say he liked that.

Jack moved his hand away. “Worry about _them_ ,” he said, and Owen realized for the first time that he sounded scared—him, Captain Jack Harkness. He couldn’t stand the thought of losing all three of them in one go.

Neither could Owen. He wanted to do something—something Jack would have done, something gushy and affectionate—to show he was grateful, grateful and sorry. But he wasn’t good at that sort of thing.

“Thanks,” he said, wheeling away before he could have to come up with anything else. “Tosh?”

“Still cold,” she managed through chattering teeth. “Why is it so dark?”

“Dark?” It threw him. If anything, she should find the room too bloody bright, given how dilated her eyes looked and the fact that he hadn’t had time to switch off any of the lamps. “You think it’s dark?”

“You’re not here,” Tosh said softly. “Oh God, you’re not here.”

“What the hell is happening?”

Ianto moaned and stirred, blinking—and then the shivering started up, same as Tosh’s. And Owen was out of jackets to drape over people. He crouched down and pressed his palms flat against Ianto’s thighs, trying to impart what pathetic warmth he could.

“I know. You’re cold.”

But Ianto didn’t acknowledge him at all. It was like he couldn’t even feel him. He wrapped up on himself, squeezing his eyes shut. Another low moan came out through his chattering teeth.

“Ianto?”

Nothing.

“Tosh?”

She turned her head a bit to look at him, but she was looking through him, really. “You’re not here,” she said again, her voice breaking. “You’re just a dream I had. All of you.”

There was one bright side to being dead: the panic felt qualitatively different. Not by much, but enough to matter. His head was a bit clearer.

Since Ianto had gone quiet on him and Gwen and Jack weren’t conscious yet, Tosh was all he had to go on. Reporting feeling cold and like the room was dark, followed by confusion? Disorientation? Outright delusion? No, he was looking at it from the wrong angle. He couldn’t understand how someone with dilated pupils would find a bright room dark. Her relationship to reality, to her own senses, must have gone haywire—so haywire that maybe they weren’t talking a human brain tipped askew from a _human_ reality at all. Because, after all, whatever the pizza had been laced with was like no earthly poison or drug he’d ever seen, and he’d studied up on the first and even taken a few of the second. This was something tailormade for Torchwood. Something alien and strong enough to drown out the evidence of their own nerve endings. So maybe what Tosh was perceiving—and what had pulled Ianto away from them—was something accurate but alien; something he didn’t have access to.

Dark and cold and alone. Impossible as it was, he’d swear he felt the hairs on his arms stand up.

“Tosh,” he said, cupping her face in his hands. “Tosh, is there something in the dark with you? Something moving?”

If someone had hung them up somehow halfway between life and death—

But she shook her head, thank God. “No. It’s just empty. Everyone’s gone.”

“I’m not gone. I’m right here. We all are.”

“They were never here. I never had this.” She closed her eyes. “They said they'd make an example of me, and they did. He never got me out.”

Shit. Not in between life and death. In a memory, her own experiences overwritten, overridden. No, not even that—a false memory of some kind. A waking nightmare. Each of them in their own little pocket of hell. And it was taking a physical toll on them. If they went on like this, shaking and terrified, their hearts would burst like rabbits’. He’d felt Jack’s. And Jack had the constitution of a fucking ox and could bounce back up again like rubber. The others …

He had get them out of it. Sedate them? Why would that work when the ipecac hadn’t? Blood vs. digestive tract, maybe, but he'd lose precious time fetching the drugs up if it didn't work. Okay, worst case scenario: say that for right now, their relationship to the outside world, to sensory input, to medical intervention, was about as nil as his own.

What did he still have to work with? What did he know was getting through to them?

Hearing, a bit. Touch, a bit. Neither had been enough to draw out Ianto and neither had convinced Tosh, but he couldn’t think of anything else.

Triage. Two cases of approximately equal danger. You had to work on the one who seemed to have a better chance of coming through. And Tosh was listening to him.

And if Ianto died while he was with her—

He wouldn’t. Couldn’t.

He settled for kneeling down in front of Tosh and reaching out to clumsily wrap one hand around Ianto’s ankle, like he had to be a tether holding him down.

“Jack came and got you,” Owen said to Tosh. He tried to keep his voice steady. He wound his fingers in with hers. “That’s what’s real, Tosh. He got you out and you dissected a space pig for me and we’ve got a game of pool to play sometime, I promise.”

“None of it makes any sense.” A tear rolled down her cheek, and Owen thumbed it away. “It can’t be real.”

“Life’s mad. You won’t get any argument from me there. But that doesn’t mean it’s not real, Tosh, all right? _Feel_ it. You can feel me holding your hand, can’t you? You know what’s happened? You ate a bad slice of pizza. It’s embarrassing, you know that? It’s too stupid to be anything but true, and you’re too clever to have been the one to make it up.”

She made a sound, almost a laugh, but she didn’t open her eyes. What else, what else. What would convince her—what would convince Tosh, dreamy, curious, hard-minded, soft-hearted, steel-spined Tosh to throw away all the evidence of her senses but the voice in her head? Evidence, mystery—and hope. He had to give her something to pin her hopes on. And he was the last person anyone would pick for that.

Maybe he could lead with everything else. “Here.” He disentangled their hands and guided her fingers down carefully over his own. “Feel it. You can feel the glove. Think back—you know you felt it before. Glove on one hand and not on the other, and I’m not Michael sodding Jackson, am I? Why’s it there?”

She sucked in a breath. Teeth not chattering quite so much now. “Because—because you broke your finger. Your little finger. And it won’t heal.”

“That’s right. I’m an idiot.” He pulled at her until she was bent down, their foreheads touching. “And if you were right, if you were still in prison waiting on Jack—and I’ll grant you, Jack seems like he walked straight out of somebody’s fantasy—if you’re there, then we never met, did we? So you went and imagined yourself a dead doctor who cocked up a good chance with you. Now, that’s just rubbish. You could do better than that. You’d have had us shag, at least. I can’t be a fantasy, Tosh. I’m not good enough for it.”

Evidence. Mystery. Hope. Hope, where did he get hope from? He wasn’t kissing her again. That was a distraction; it wasn’t _hope_.

He didn’t have any of that on offer.

Need, then.

“You’ve got to come back,” Owen said. “I’m not going to be able to get on without you, plain and simple. Even for the next ten minutes—it’s rubbish. Come on, Tosh.”

Besides, if she thought she was trapped in UNIT's hellhole, hopeless and alone in the dark, he didn’t see how going mad wouldn’t be the better option anyhow. Didn’t exactly want to risk making that argument, though. She was more resilient than he was, all things considered; she might just choose what she thought was reality, no matter how grim it was.

“Come on,” he said again, more softly this time.

She squeezed his hands back, and slowly—slower than he’d have liked—she opened her eyes again. Then she winced and closed them.

“It’s so bright.”

He pressed an enthusiastic kiss to her forehead. “Yes. Yes, it absolutely is. Your eyes will adjust, just give them a minute. What do you remember?”

She looked at him through the dark fringe of her eyelashes. “We were eating dinner …”

“Right. Only nobody’d ordered the pizza; you lot just decided to chow down on whatever showed up at the door. Life is wasted on the bloody living. Take the pizza, test it six ways to Sunday, and tell me what I’m dealing with. I’ve got Ianto and Gwen and Jack all still out—well, Ianto’s awake, but as you can see, it’s still not going very well. I don’t know if whatever they dosed you with is psychotropic or alien or both, but it hijacks you, sticks your perceptions way down deep in some nightmare.”

Her eyes were open a little wider now, her pupils a little closer to normal. “Right. I’ll see what I can find out and maybe get you something to counteract it.”

“You’re an angel.”

Wait—no. They ought to switch. Tosh could draw the rest of them out, if possible, and he could run the tests. Toxicology was way closer to his expertise than hers—not that she couldn’t do it. They were all cross-trained, thanks to Jack’s paranoia about what’d happen if one of them was stuck on their own. But still. _He_ wasn’t cross-trained on … dealing with people. Even _his_ people.

But Tosh looked so raw, like whether she remembered it or not, she’d rubbed against something sharp, down there in her subconscious, and she was still bloody from it. He knew what he’d want in her shoes. Hard science. Easy answers. Not to go wading around in the muck of everyone’s nightmares, feeling your hands slip around on the rope that you were supposed to use to pull them up and out.

So he didn’t stop her when she stood, wobbly-legged, and started for the door. He didn’t tell her to come back.

She’d find something, some kind of answer, some kind of counteragent. And in meantime, maybe he could at least keep everyone else calm, lessen the wear-and-tear on their hearts.

Gwen was awake now, too.

“Gwen?”

“I fucked it all up,” she said. Her voice was thick with tears. “I had it right—just for a second there, I had everything right—and I fucked it up.”

“No, you didn’t.” Not that he had any clue what she was talking about.

“Like glass, like glass made out of spun sugar. Prop glass, the kind in the films. Perfect—and then it shatters. It shatters so easily.”

“Right, well, it’s made to, isn’t it? So people can go flying through windshields?”

She shook her head, but she didn’t say anything else, and right when he was about to try her again, Ianto made a small noise in his throat, something so close to a held-in sob that Owen couldn’t bring himself to ignore him any longer. Gwen would hold on. She had the training for it. Back to triage—and Ianto had moved to being the one most in danger, the one who’d been caught in the dark the longest now.

Owen took Ianto’s hands in his, but what had worked with Tosh was not, apparently, destined to work with Ianto, because Ianto pulled away, tightening himself up, drawing in. Like a hermit crab skittering back into his shell.

And what was worse was he smiled when he did it. It was a familiar smile, polite and handsome and unflappable, the smile of a consummate professional.

He hadn’t seen it in a while, but for a long time, it’d been how he just thought Ianto _was_. It hadn’t been until after Lisa that he’d seen otherwise.

“You don’t have to do that, you know. You don’t have to pretend. I mean, mate, none of us are going to set any records for shiny, happy normalcy.”

Nothing.

“Is it Lisa? Are you back with Lisa?”

That finally got him something. Ianto stirred, his eyes opening. Pupils still so wide they’d practically drowned any other color there in black.

Ianto looking at him but not seeing him.

“Lisa,” Ianto said.

No way. If he playacted Ianto’s dead cyber-girlfriend and Ianto _did_ remember it when he came out of this, Owen would rediscover ordinary mortality very, very quickly, namely by having an enraged Ianto bash his head in.

“I’m not Lisa. Lisa’s—not here. But, ah, Jack’s here. You remember Jack, don’t you?”

“They’re all dead.”

Christ. Right. He was dealing with one of the few people who’d made it out of Torchwood One alive.

 _Nobody’s dead but me_ , he started to say, but that might not be exactly reassuring.

“Nobody’s dead. You’re not at Canary Wharf, you’re in Cardiff. I know, ordinarily that’d be enough of a nightmare, at least for me, but I suppose you grew up here. I try not to hold it against you.”

“She’s gone.”

Yes and no. No, she wasn’t then, not yet, except maybe the best parts of her or the strongest ones, the ones that had had a hand on the steering wheel of her. But yes, still, because she was gone _now_ , and she’d gone hard and bloody. It wasn’t like he wanted to call all that back.

“You’re in Cardiff,” he repeated. Broken record.

Ianto’s eyes didn’t exactly focus on him, but a little more understanding crept into his face; either that, or Owen just thought people looked more awake when they were annoyed. “I know I’m in Cardiff.”

“All right. No need to take my head off.” He ignored the surge of relief that had brought him. “Do you know what’s been happening? What’s the last thing you remember?”

“They’re all dead.”

Back on that one again. “Who’s dead?”

“All of them.” Ianto’s nearly black eyes met his, and Owen saw that he was crying. “They’re all lost. Jack and Toshiko and Gwen and Owen—”

“I’m last, am I? Typical. Ianto, that’s not what’s happening. I _promise_ you it’s not. And if it were, I’d tell you, because I’m an arsehole. I would rub your face in it.”

“You’re not Owen.”

“Yes, I am. I’m shit out of luck, so I am. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“I shot him.” His voice broke, rough with tears. “God, I killed him.”

The way their lives went, it honestly took him a minute to remember what the hell Ianto was talking about; at first he thought it was made up whole-cloth. “You didn’t kill me. You’re a rubbish shot; you barely even knocked me down. And in your defense, I _was_ trying to open the Rift, and that turned out to be a really shit idea.”

“No. I’m the only one. All over again—and this time it’s worse, because …”

“Repeats always are.”

“Because it’s not just Lisa. It’s not just Jack. It’s all of them. I can’t lose all of them—it was only Lisa, before, I could get over everyone else. I got out whole, and she was still alive—I thought she was still herself, she could still be fixed. I could live with it. I could even live without her. But not without them, not if I'm the only one left. It’s like they’re everything.”

This was too big for him. He couldn’t hope to chisel it down to something manageable, not with what he had to offer.

_That’s too much, mate. You can’t put that on us. People die here all the time: it’s the job._

An inane fucking excuse, even to him. He couldn’t have lost them either. Not a one of them, and all of them in one go, if that was really what Ianto thought had happened—God, how could any of them survive that?

Jack could. Jack would have to. Bloody immortality.

Though at least that gave him an idea, because he knew what he’d find comforting, and maybe he and Ianto were more alike than he’d ever guessed, which was to say that maybe they had something in common besides being, oh, male bipeds of around the same age.

“Not all of us,” Owen said. “Even in whatever cocked-up scenario you’re playing out in your head, you know better. Use your brain, Ianto. Jack _can’t die_ , you knob. He’s like bloody Chumbawumba, like what’s-its-name—‘Tubthumping.’ He gets knocked down and he gets up again. And you can remember what happened with me when your precious Risen Mitten was through. Dead man walking, yeah? So dead, I’ll grant you, but fuck it, alive too. I don’t have any vital processes to put a stop to these days. So you know what? Worst case scenario, and it is _fucking_ bleak—something happens, you still have Jack, and you still have me.”

Ianto blinked. “Owen?” Sounding properly confused, so that was a good thing.

The Jack bit must have sold him.

Owen, feeling like a twat, wasn’t willing to let go of Ianto’s hands just yet. “Are you with me?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I think so. My head feels like someone’s gone at it with a hammer. What happened?”

“Pizza.” He made himself stand up and back away. “Pizza happened. Poisoned nightmare pizza, first time I’ve ever been glad I can’t eat anything. Now—”

 _Help me with Gwen_ , he’d been about to say, but Tosh ran in, breathless and flushed and carrying what was hopefully a syringe full of miracle cure. Just how he liked a woman: all stirred up and armed with high-grade pharmaceuticals.

“I’ve got it,” she said. And this was classic Tosh: still horrified for them, but excited about her discovery all the same. “There was something in the files about it from three generations ago—aliens who feed on nightmares. They're parasites: they embed themselves in someone's mind to drink up their fear until they're so dry there's nothing left. Induced, waking nightmares. And then before the host dies, the alien forces them to pass along a copy of it—”

“So an alien nightmare creature possessed someone, tortured them, and made them deliver a pizza slathered in cloned alien goo, but the delivery boy’s probably already carked it, so we can't ask him any questions. About right?”

“More or less. It must have been hoping to infect all of us so it could spread out its copies further. But why us?”

“Problem for another day.” No, it wasn't. He already knew: they had better nightmares, and they knew how to survive them. They'd be good long feasts. “But you _do_ have something? Some kind of serum to kill the parasite? If so, can you stick Gwen and Jack with it?”

“Jack’s still unconscious,” Ianto reported.

“Thank you. I’m only the doctor, so I couldn’t quite tell. His nightmares are probably more elaborate than ours; for all I know they take longer to construct.”

Ianto still looked dazed; he only nodded, like he imagined that made as much sense as anything else. It’d be their motto, if they had one.

Tosh passed him the syringe, and he gave Gwen the injection first, taking off her jacket and not liking how she just let it happen. Her face was slack with guilt and horror.

Owen found himself saying, “Easy, it’s all right,” to her as he gave her the shot. If he’d wanted to do this much coaxing and petting, he’d have become a veterinarian. He wasn’t a natural for this kind of thing.

It only took a few anxious seconds, and then Gwen’s expression seemed to ease. He checked her pulse and felt it dropping back down to normal.

He wondered what it was she thought she’d fucked up. Hopefully she’d have forgotten, since it wasn’t like he’d Svengalied her out of it. Drugs: much better therapy.

Tosh started talking to her, waking her up, and Owen turned to Jack. Used needle, but he really didn’t want to wait to go get another one. If Jack was in hell, he didn’t want to leave him there any longer than he had, and besides, the man was invincible and Gwen’s blood was clean as a whistle. As of last Friday’s routine checks, anyway. Fuck it. He depressed the plunger, ridding himself of the last of Tosh’s concoction.

“Not very sanitary,” Ianto said.

It took Owen a moment to realize he was joking. “I think he’ll cope.”

He gave the three of them an exam, finally trusting them on their own again while he went to go get his medical bag: he took their temperatures, checked their blood pressure, and basically ran as many immediately verifiable tests on them as he could come up with. They were fine, or at any rate there wasn’t anything wrong with them that a glass of orange juice and a good night’s sleep wouldn’t cure. And then Jack woke up, and Owen checked him over too. The same story there.

Glass of orange juice and a good night’s sleep. Neither of which Owen could enjoy himself.

Of course, nothing had happened to him, so he didn’t need to be made better again. But he wished he could sleep for a year or even a minute. Anything.

When he started talking, his voice sounded too loud. “Well, I hope you’ve all learned something from this. Because the next time you’re walking through the woods and see a witch’s candy house, you might not have the dead man along to drag you back out again.”

“Thank you,” Jack said simply, like Owen had been _sincere_.

He was scraping the bottom of himself, and whatever he had down there, it wasn’t anything for polite company. He said, “I’m going home, if it’s all the same to everyone.”

“Oh, stay,” Tosh said. He almost would have, for her—but he’d stripped himself bare with them over the last hour or so, cracked his chest open and given her and Ianto everything that was left in his heart, and they didn’t remember any of it, and he felt like shit. He’d bottomed out, and the only way he could think of to buoy back up again was just to go. Lick his wounds—whatever they were—in private.

He shook his head. “I’ll see you all tomorrow.”

Home, then. Back to his flat to watch whatever TV had piled up on his DVR, things he couldn’t even remember choosing to record. Back to an empty fridge and an empty bed, the sheets less and less rumpled now that he was actually getting out of the habit of lying down.

He kicked off his shoes and put his feet up; he made it through almost three hours of _Top Gear_ before Ianto let himself in.

“Are you breaking and entering?” Owen called without getting up.

“Yes. I’m a criminal mastermind.” He went straight for the kitchen. “Don’t mind me. Just making some eggs.”

“What? Why are you _cooking_ in my flat?”

“Well, you’ve got a kitchen and you’re not using it,” Ianto said, like that was reasonable. “Besides, maybe you like the smell. You’ve still got that.”

He hadn’t told anyone that. He turned off the TV and hauled himself to his feet, joining Ianto in the kitchen.

Ianto looked back at him over his shoulder and apparently deduced what had gotten him up. “I could tell. You were flaring your nostrils a lot.”

“That’s attractive.”

“I’ll try not to hold it against you.”

“Not to repeat myself, but why have you come over to make eggs? That I can’t even _eat_?”

“They’re not for you, they’re for me. I barely had a slice of pizza before all hell broke lose. And—” He was making a French omelettes, Owen realized, and doing it with an irritating perfection. He poured in his whisked eggs, and they spread out in a perfect golden circle across the sizzling butter; he started pushing at them with the spatula and shaking the pan like he’d done a year at the Cordon Bleu. “I watched the security footage.”

Owen felt his chest heave in a kind of silent sigh. “Of course you did.”

“I was curious.”

“All right, then you watched it and you know nothing happened to me. Go check in on your boyfriend. Or Tosh and Gwen. Literally anyone _but_ me would be delighted to have you break down their door and start making an omelette.”

“Nice of you to say.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

Ianto gave him a quick grin. “Jack doesn’t need checking on, not right now, and if he does, I’ll have all night to do it. Gwen has Rhys. And Tosh will be here in a minute—so it’s omelettes plural, by the way, because she’ll want one too.”

“Fantastic.”

“We don’t remember,” Ianto said quietly, “but you do. You were there, and you were alone.”

The smell of frying egg and butter was responsible for him feeling like something had come loose inside him; he wanted it on the record that that was all it was. “I still wasn’t the one trapped in a nightmare.”

“Weren’t you? Because what you were stuck with seemed about that way to me. Close to what I was talking about, and I ought to know. I’ve had that dream before.” He folded up the egg, rolling it into a cylinder. “Tosh thought she’d never gotten us, that it was all wishful thinking. I thought that I’d lost you all, that I was back to being the only one. What would you have gotten? And if you want to help, by the way, you can go on and start beating another couple of eggs. Pinch of kosher salt.”

He didn’t know why, but he did it. There was something—satisfyingly finite, satisfyingly _certain_ about cracking eggs into a bowl, adding a bit of water and salt. It only took about a minute to get it right, and you couldn’t get that kind of success rate most places.

He said, “A bit like yours, yeah. Only it’s not too late—you’re not all gone, you’re just going. You’re dying, and if I were good enough, _really_ good enough, I could save you, but I don’t. And it’s my fault.”

Ianto took the glass bowl from him, his hand steadying Owen’s for a moment. “It wouldn’t be true, though. Not today. You did save us. You have to know that.”

“But I could have gotten it so wrong. You don’t understand. You’re—” He made some kind of frustrated hand gesture.

“Taller?”

Owen hadn’t broken anything necessary for the two-fingered salute, so he made use of it. “Good with people. _Empathetic_. The kind of person who breaks into someone’s apartment to inflict inedible breakfast on them. I’m not.”

Ianto shook his head. “You pulled us out, Owen. You were in your dream, and you got us out of ours. And that’s not nothing, and it’s not just chance.” His omelette was overcooking, browning on the edges. “For the record, what you told Tosh, about not being good enough to be a fantasy—shit.” He ran a quick salvage job on the eggs.

“I’m sorry,” Owen said, enjoying himself a little as he watched Ianto fight the frying pan. “If you’re saying I _am_ good enough to be a fantasy, I’d like to actually hear it.”

“Well, you’re not bad.”

They looked at each other for a second, and then they were both laughing—laughing at nothing, really, but it felt good all the same. He’d forgotten that, like scent, was one of the handful of physical pleasures he still had left.

“So Tosh and I are going to have dinner here—non-poisonous, I should hope—and we can watch whatever you had on when I came in.”

It wasn’t quite a good night’s sleep, but if it was as close as he could come, he supposed it wasn’t so bad.

And the smell _was_ decent.

“I could learn how to cook stuff,” he said. “It’s deeply idiotic, but I could do it.”

“A chef who can’t eat or taste.” Ianto shrugged. “Beethoven went deaf and he still carried on composing. Maybe you could be the Beethoven of kebabs. I wouldn’t object.”

“It wouldn’t have anything to do with you. I just mean for the smell.”

“You could bring things into the Hub. I actually do trust you not to poison us all—intentionally, at least. So in a way, it would a boon to a security.” He gave Owen no time at all to consider this, because the door was opening again—didn’t anyone _knock_ anymore?—and then Ianto was saying, “Good news, Owen’s agreed to start cooking for us every so often. Bring your scones to work day.”

“I didn’t remotely agree to that,” Owen said.

“It’ll be nice,” Tosh said. “Here, I brought that coffee you like.” She handed him a neat little paper sack filled with the finest, strongest coffee beans his medical school program had had to offer.

Owen raised them up to his face and inhaled deeply; the familiar bitter, nutty smell flooded him. Funny the things that still worked even when everything else shut down—he’d reached them, and they’d reached him.

Maybe Ianto was right. Maybe it wasn’t just chance. Maybe they weren’t just chance, either.

“I’ll go ahead and set the table, then,” he said.


End file.
